The field of the invention is space management technology and architecture for distinguishing physical spaces and helping people take optimal advantage of affordances within a generally open office plan.
Many companies employ open office plans for use by many and in some cases substantially all of their employees where each employee is assigned to a workstation generally located within a large ambient space (e.g., a portion of a floor within a building) within a facility. One primary advantage often associated with open office plans is cost savings. To this end, an open plan necessarily means that fewer architectural walls are constructed within the large ambient space and therefore costs associated with such walls are avoided. In addition, the amount of space required to provide workstations in an open office plan is usually less than cases where architectural walls divide each employee's space from the larger ambient space and therefore an open plan can reduce costs associated with space. This is because walled spaces tend to feel claustrophobic when compared to open office spaces and therefore when full walls are provided, larger spaces are generally required.
Another advantage associated with open office environments is that people tend to communicate and therefore collaborate more readily in open environments when compared to how they interact where individual spaces are physically separated by full wall structures. To this end, in an open environment, employees are more aware of who is present in a space, who is available in a space, what other employees are working on, etc., and therefore, are more likely to participate in impromptu meetings or short collaborations that can impact effectiveness appreciably.
Yet one other advantage often associated with open office plans is that the affordances required to provide individual workstations within such plans are relatively easy and inexpensive to reconfigure when different station juxtapositions are considered advantageous for some reason. For instance, where three additional workstations are required for three additional employees, a set of 22 existing workstations may be rearranged in a space to make space for the three additional workstations.
While totally open environments have been adopted in some facilities, in many facilities, while the open office plan is employed, at least some partial dividing walls and/or screen assemblies are provided so that employees have at least a minimal sense of privacy at their workstations. For instance, the office furniture industry has provided frame based partial wall structures for decades that include walls to divide one workstation from another so that the view of a first employee in a first station is at least obstructed into adjacent stations when the first employee is seated in the first station and so that the views of other employees in the adjacent stations are at least obstructed into the first station when the other employees are seated. As another instance, screen members are sometimes provided that at least partially block viewing angles into workstations from adjacent stations to increase the level or privacy.
In a further effort to reduce costs, many employers now have at least some if not most of their employees work from home or otherwise remotely at least some of the time. In these cases, many employees still have to be in employer facilities at least periodically if not often. For this reason, many employers still provide workstations for employees, albeit for temporary use when the employees are located in specific facilities. Unless indicated otherwise, the act of temporarily using a workstation located in an open office plan will be referred to hereinafter as “hotelling” and workstations provided for hotelling purposes will be referred to as “hotelling stations”.
While open office plans like those described above and hotelling have proven advantageous in many cases, open office plans and hotelling in general have several shortcomings. First, many employees that temporarily hotel in an open office space feel undervalued by their employers as their workstations are completely impersonal. In this regard, hotelling stations often are not adjustable to accommodate different employee preferences. For instance, a first employee may prefer a thirty inch high worksurface, a display screen supported at a first height, a first light intensity and a first ambient temperature while a second employee prefers a standing height worksurface, a display screen supported at a second height, a second light intensity and a second ambient temperature. In many cases, especially in open office plans, there is no ability to adjust any of these environmental parameters to personal preferences. In instances where parameters can be adjusted to personal preferences, in many cases those preferences are never adjusted by employees either because an employee does not understand how to adjust the preferences or because parameter adjustment is just too burdensome. As another instance, known hotelling stations are not decorated or otherwise customized to specific employee preferences. For instance, a first employee may love nature and prefer to immerse himself in a space that includes images of nature while a second employee has three kids and would prefer to have images of those kids in her peripheral view.
Second, many employees at open plan hotelling stations act as if they are in separately enclosed offices and have impromptu meetings at their temporary stations as opposed to going to a private conference room where their meetings will not interrupt other employees proximate their stations. Sound from these impromptu meetings often travels substantially unimpeded within an open office environment and can adversely affect other employee's concentration. This is particularly true in cases where employees are sharing and discussing digital content on a computer display screen or the like where discussion is often necessary.
Third, in many cases employees passing by other employees at workstations in open spaces assume or at least act as if it is acceptable to stop by and start a conversation with the employees at the stations. These types of interruptions are often unwanted but the disrupted employees often feel uncomfortable shutting down a fellow employee that initiates the communication. The end result is that work efficiency is appreciably reduced.
Fourth, some activities simply require greater privacy than afforded at an open space hotelling station. For example, where a first employee needs to participate in a telepresence session via the employee's laptop or the like with a remote employee to discuss employee performance review, the information discussed will often be of a personal and private nature. In these cases, an open space station is insufficient to meet employee needs.
Fifth, where teleconferencing is to take place, most open space hotelling stations are not optimally equipped to facilitate telepresence. For instance, most hotelling stations do not have optimized lighting, sound or even optimized high definition imaging equipment (e.g., a high definition camera) and/or the arrangement of such equipment is not optimized for use with the other station affordances as telepresence is usually only a secondary feature associated with the station. In addition, many enterprises choose not to provide telepresence cameras and other equipment at hotelling stations because such equipment is cost prohibitive and so that employees are not encouraged to participate in telepresence sessions at their stations which routinely disturb other employees in the general area.
Sixth, while all open space hotelling stations in a facility may have similar configurations and may operate in similar fashions, not all stations will be “equal” when it comes to the environmental characteristics associated with each space which are often very different at different locations within a larger space. To this end, consider first and second different hotelling stations located in a single large open space where the first station is located in a far corner of the large open space and the second station is located just outside a restroom and proximate a coffee station. In this example, it can be expected that noise proximate the first station will be substantially less than the noise expected proximate the second station. Similarly, it can be expected that foot traffic proximate the first station will be relatively less than the foot traffic proximate the second station. As another example, consider a case where a first station is proximate a large exterior window of a large open space and a second station is centrally located within the large space and is distant from any exterior windows. In this case, it can be expected that there will be substantially more natural light proximate the first station that proximate the second station. Where an employee does not routinely hotel in a specific facility, the employee would blindly select a hotelling space which, in many cases, would have environmental characteristics that are not optimized for the employee's preferences.
Seventh, in many cases an employee may prefer to be located in an open space in some relative juxtaposition to other hotelling employees in the space or in adjacent spaces. For instance, in some cases a first employee that is on a specific team of employees handling a project may want to spend a day in relative seclusion to facilitate individual focused work activities and therefore may want to be stationed at a hotelling station that is remote from other employees on the team. In contrast, a second employee may want to be located proximate other employees on the team so that collaborative activity may be facilitated. In each of these cases and in other cases where a first employee wants to work in a hotelling space that is relatively juxtaposed to other employees on a team or, for that matter, other employees in general, the only known solution is for the first employee to walk around in the space and visually search for the locations of other employees and to select a hotelling space based on her visual investigation.
Eighth, all other things being equal, most employees would like to be located at a convenient location to the locations of other resources within a space that the employee will use. Most importantly, in many cases, employees like hotelling spaces that are proximate the locations of other resources that the employees are scheduled to use during a given day such as, for instance, conference or meting spaces. Thus, where a first employee is scheduled to attend three meetings during a day that are to take place in three adjacent conference rooms, it is highly likely the first employee would like to use a hotelling space that is proximate the three conference rooms as opposed to on the other side of a large facility. No known existing system allows an employee to identify an optimal hotelling space based on proximity to other scheduled resources.
To deal with at least some of the problems described above, in most cases where hotelling workstations are provided in an open plan, at least some space in the open plan is still divided from the larger space via architectural wall structures for private meetings between groups or teams of employees. Thus, for instance, in a space that includes 100 individual workstations, six full walled conference spaces may be provided including three spaces sized for up to ten employees and three spaces sized for up to four employees each. Hereinafter, unless indicated otherwise, a full walled conference space will be referred to as a conference room. Employees may have no choice but to move to conference rooms to hold meetings, to share digital content in an amplified format, to facilitate teleconference activities, or when additional privacy is required by an employee that wants to facilitate individual focused work.
Even in cases where one or more employees use a conference room to facilitate activities, the rooms are not optimized for such activities. For instance, lighting in a large conference room typically includes area lighting as opposed to task lighting required for optimized individual focused work activities. In addition, area lighting often cannot be adjusted in color, intensity, etc., to meet a user's preferences and many conference rooms have area sound systems that are not optimized for individual use or appreciation. Similarly, large spaces like a conference room typically are not equipped with subspace environmental controls for heating, air circulation, etc. Moreover, many employees that have worked alone in a large conference room designed for several employees have a sense of being swallowed up in the space as opposed to “fitting” well within the room.
Even in cases where conference rooms are provided in open office spaces, there are often several barriers to use. First, in the case of a hotelling arrangement, a hotelling employee unfamiliar with a large facility space may not know the locations of conference spaces and may not care to spend the time and effort to figure out the locations. Second, even when an employee knows the locations of conference rooms in a space, many times the conference rooms most closely located to an employee's hotelling station will be booked when the employee would like to use resources therein and therefore, to use a different conference room, the employee would have to travel an extended distance which the employee may not be willing to do. Third, many activities may only have short time durations and an employee may think it is not worth the effort to access conference room resources for such a short time even though those resources would appreciably increase the value of the activity. For instance, a first employee may want to share a set of ten images with a second employee to discuss a new product line and it may be useful to view and discuss those images in an amplified format. The first employee may not want to go through the trouble of reserving a conference space for the few minutes required to share the images. Fourth, in many cases where amplification or telepresence resources are provided in conference rooms, those resources are not easy to boot up requiring a series of steps by an employee. Exacerbating matters, many facilities or enterprises include more than one type of amplification or telepresence system and employees are often times intimidated by the thought of trying to boot up a system that they are unfamiliar with, especially if the system is only required for a short duration. Fifth, many employees are under the impression that the affordances and expenses associated with conference rooms should only be utilized for large group meetings or particularly important activities.
The barriers to use described above typically result in an underutilization of conference space resources even though those resources could facilitate and enhance many employee activities. Instead of using conference space resources when it would be advantageous, employees routinely opt for poor substitutes and simply “make do” with the resources at their hotelling stations. For instance, instead of using a telepresence system in a conference space to facilitate a discussion with a remote employee, a local employee may simply use a phone. As another instance, instead of sharing digital content with a remote employee directly, a local employee may have a remote employee link to a copy of a document and each may have to flip through their instance of the document simultaneously to view the same content. As another instance, instead of first and second employees amplifying content to share and collaborate, the first and second employees may huddle around a laptop display screen to view the content. As still one other example, instead of using a space with substantial visual blocking structure to facilitate individual focused work, an employee may opt to use a hotelling station that does not include such affordances.
Thus, what is needed is a space management system that can help people efficiently select and use optimal space affordances within unfamiliar enterprise spaces where optimal means, effectively, consistent with an employee's current preference set in terms of activities to be performed, location relative to various scheduled and unscheduled resources, environmental characteristics associated with affordance locations, locations of specific other employees and/or employees generally, or any combination of the above or other preferences. What is also needed is a system that can help guide employees within unfamiliar enterprise spaces to affordances to be used by the employees as well as a system that softly or quietly encourages good open space plan use by all employees. What is further needed is a system that automatically customizes hotelling stations and other space affordance configurations given preferences of employees using spaces as well as information related to activities to be performed in those spaces and that automatically adjusts space affordance settings to optimal values for supporting different types of activities. It would be advantageous if a system with the attributes described here could be implemented substantially automatically, requiring only minimal if any actions on the part of an employee to take advantage of the affordance attributes.
What is also needed is an overall space layout that provides a set of different affordance configurations including a separate affordance type for each of several different types of activities that typical employees engage in throughout the course of a day. Here, instead of trying to support many employee needs via a one size fits all workstation, several different affordance configurations should be provided where each one is optimized for a small set of specific activity types and employees should move about from configuration to configuration when different activities are to be performed. Again, transition from one configuration to another should be quick and simple and should require minimal if any actions on the part of an employee in addition to traveling from one configuration to the next.